Geek Post - My last two weeks rebuilding a computer [emoji3]
Our computer upstairs doesn't get used much these days, but once in a while we need it for something. It's a Dell optiplex 760. The disk was clearly getting crunchy on the system partition, so I decided it was time for an upgrade, double the ram and drop in a new solid state drive.
I ordered the ram and a pcie adapter for an M.2 drive that I had around. Memory went great but the m.2 was no good - turns out the 760 bios doesn't support it, no upgrade with that capability.
Newegg had a decent sale on a sata ssd so I ordered one.
In the meantime, my overall plan was to use clonezilla, which meant I had to shrink my existing hard drive's system partition down to a size that would work with the new disk. I did a half dozen rounds of compacting and optimizing using partition master and gparted tools. Gparted is fast, but the optimizing stuff is really slow, takes multiple reboots, sliding the file table around, temporarily disabling pagefile and swapfile on the system partition.
The new sata ssd shows, along with a 3.5" adapter. I do a partition-partition clone with clonezilla, connect the new drive as primary, and voila! - won't boot, no operating system detected [emoji3]
Running
through my available cloning tools I broke out aomei. I set it up to do a direct system clone to new ssd and it
throws a mystery error 209, which is it saying it isn't happy with the new ssd's file table before it even starts to clone - a nutty error since cloning involves writing over anything that previously exists on the disk.
I recable the ssd to act as an external usb drive, reboot the old hard disk, format the ssd, run a chkdsk /f /r on it, no errors.
Reconnect the ssd as as internal sata drive, tell aomei to clone, end up with the same error.
More head scratching, research, I finally break out minitool partition wizard. I tell it to clone the system to a new partition, and do the same for my old disk's data partition, as well as leaving a bit of blank space that I could reconfigure later to be the pagefile and swapfile partition.
Finally success! The computer is now much more responsive, no glitches, and I've retained the old disk in it in case I ever have to swap back.
I'll probably look for another sata ssd on black Friday sales, a larger one for my data files and to be the backup for the relatively small ssd.
I've got another sata cable on the way, so I can reconnect the dvd, but that one really "should" be a 5 minute job.